PREFACE

IN refashioning, for the pleasure of readers of the
twentieth century, these versions of ancient tales
which have given pleasure to story-lovers of all
centuries from the eighth onward, I feel that some
explanation of my choice is necessary. Men’s conceptions
of the heroic change with changing years, and vary
with each individual mind; hence it often happens that
one person sees in a legend only the central heroism,
while another sees only the inartistic details of mediæval
life which tend to disguise and warp the heroic quality.

It may be that to some people the heroes I have
chosen do not seem heroic, but there is no doubt that
to the age and generation which wrote or sang of them
they appeared real heroes, worthy of remembrance and
celebration, and it has been my object to come as close
as possible to the mediæval mind, with its elementary
conceptions of honour, loyalty, devotion, and duty. I
have therefore altered the tales as little as I could,
and have tried to put them as fairly as possible before
modern readers, bearing in mind the altered conditions
of things and of intellects to-day.

In the work of selecting and retelling these stories
I have to acknowledge with most hearty thanks the
help and advice of Mr. F. E. Bumby, B.A., of the
University College, Nottingham, who has been throughout
a most kind and candid censor or critic. His
help has been in every way invaluable. I have also
to acknowledge the generous permission given me by
Mr. W. B. Yeats to write in prose the story of his
beautiful play, “The Countess Cathleen,” and to adorn
it with quotations from that play.

The poetical quotations are attributed to the authors
[Pg x]
from whose works they are taken wherever it is possible.
When mediæval passages occur which are not
thus attributed they are my own versions from the
original mediæval poems.

INTRODUCTION

THE writer who would tell again for people of the
twentieth century the legends and stories that
delighted the folk of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries finds himself confronted with a vast
mass of material ready to his hand. Unless he exercises
a wise discrimination and has some system of
selection, he becomes lost in the mazes of as enchanted
a land,

as ever bewildered knights of old in days of romance.
Down all the dimly lighted pathways of mediæval literature
mystical figures beckon him in every direction;
fairies, goblins, witches, knights and ladies and giants
entice him, and unless, like Theseus of old, he follows
closely his guiding clue, he will find that he reaches
no goal, attains to no clear vision, achieves no quest.
He will remain spell-bound, captivated by the Middle
Ages—

“The life, the delight, and the sorrowOf troublous and chivalrous yearsThat knew not of night nor of morrow,Of hopes or of fears.The wars and the woes and the gloriesThat quicken, and lighten, and rainFrom the clouds of its chronicled storiesThe passion, the pride, and the pain.”[2]

Such a golden clue to guide the modern seeker through
the labyrinths of the mediæval mind is that which I have
tried to suggest in the title “Hero-Myths and Legends
of the British Race”—the pursuit and representation
of the ideal hero as the mind of Britain and of early
and mediæval England imagined him, together with
[Pg xviii]
the study of the characteristics which made this or that
particular person, mythical or legendary, a hero to the
century which sang or wrote about him. The interest
goes deeper when we study, not merely

“Heroes of our island breedAnd men and women of our British birth.”[4]

“Hero-worship endures for ever while man endures,”
wrote Thomas Carlyle, and this fidelity of men to their
admiration for great heroes is one of the surest tokens
by which we can judge of their own character. Such
as the hero is, such will his worshippers be; and the
men who idolised Robin Hood will be found to have
been men who were themselves in revolt against
oppressive law, or who, finding law powerless to prevent
tyranny, glorified the lawless punishment of wrongs
and the bold denunciation of perverted justice. The
warriors who listened to the saga of Beowulf looked on
physical prowess as the best of all heroic qualities, and
the Normans who admired Roland saw in him the ideal
of feudal loyalty. To every age, and to every nation,
there is a peculiar ideal of heroism, and in the popular
legends of each age this ideal may be found.